Local News is Dying When We Need It Most // By Grace Walker

One of the empty Michigan Times newspaper racks that are still scattered throughout

the University of Michigan-Flint campus.  (Photo by Michigan Times Editor-in-Chief Eric Hinds)

As a journalism major, I’m always asked the inevitable questions. “Why journalism? Isn’t that a dying field? Will you ever get a job?” Sometimes I find it difficult to come up with good answers. Headlines are constantly trumpeting the demise of journalism. We’re told about the latest newspapers that went under, the growing number of journalists being laid off, and the dire threats social media poses to the profession as we become more reliant on our devices. 
 
In my community, I’ve seen the demise of local news close up. The well-known daily paper, the Flint Journal, has all but vanished. And now I am left with the unenviable title of last staff writer for the Michigan Times, the UM-Flint student newspaper closing after 68 years of publishing. 

Despite these challenges, local news coverage is now more important than ever. In a city known for its well-documented problems, local journalists are essential to illustrate these issues and explore solutions. Without this coverage, residents remain uninformed and uninterested, which kills democracy. My hope is that local news coverage survives in a different form. My question is, how? 
 
Many local journalists have been outspoken about their frustrations since the death of the Flint Journal. One such journalist, Scott Atkinson, was willing to share his experiences in the field.
 
After graduating from Michigan State University, Atkinson started at the Flint Journal in 2008 where he believed he would have a stable job for years to come. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. After a while, Atkinson left to pursue his graduate degree at the University of Michigan - Flint. Upon his return in 2013, the Flint Journal started seeing significant changes. The issue was that fewer and fewer people were looking at newspapers.
 
“If you took away social media, the newspaper is all you had,” Scott Atkinson stated. “People would flock to get a newspaper for not only the news but also the ads.”
            
In its prime, the Journal’s editions were packed with news and advertisements, sometimes hitting up to 100 pages. All of this came crashing down as the Internet gained popularity. Why pay for a newspaper when you can access free news on the Internet at home?                 
       
The Flint Journal announced in 2009 that it would reduce its print editions, and conducted massive layoffs to reduce its operating budget. The company that once saw newsrooms filled with journalists, editors, and other staff rushing to find their next story quickly became a ghost town.
 
During this time, the owners of the Flint Journal decided to combine it with the Grand Rapids Press, the Ann Arbor News and other regional papers under the banner of MLive, a heavily based internet media group that, according to its website, “provides innovative ways to inform, connect and empower Michigan.” This new arrangement resulted in even less Flint coverage.
            
This sort of consolidation is widespread. "The largest 25 newspaper chains own a third of all newspapers in the US," writes Penelope Muse Abernathy the formerly Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. "These large chains own two-thirds of all dailies."
Some of these chains include Gatehouse and AIM, two of the top five largest newspaper chains in the nation. This corporate focus only hurts the industry. Many regional newspapers now lack in-depth reporting, offer low salaries for their journalists, and provide fewer benefits. These changes created what Jason Kosnoski, who teaches political science UM-Flint, calls “a shell of an institution.”
            
Why does this matter? Journalism is vital for our democracy. It helps hold the government, corporations, and anyone else in power accountable for their actions. When this is missing, we lose a part of our democracy. We lose the right to know what’s going on in our community.      
            
“People no longer know what their city does, or why certain things are being done,” Atkinson said. 
The death of local news has helped usher in apathy in our community. Atkinson observed that local government meetings once packed with concerned citizens are now often empty. 
            
Kosnoski added that without good local journalism, people become confused, and angry, leading to distrust of institutions and governments. 
“Decline of local news is part of the decline of community,” he said.
 
This is apparent in Flint. No one seems to know or care why certain businesses are being shut down. Residents remain distrustful of their water after a decade of the ongoing water crisis. Without a robust, aggressive news source, the community lacks a trustworthy advocate that holds individuals accountable for their actions. 
            
Given this reality, what's the future of journalism? 
            
“Local news is shrinking,” Atkinson said after admitting that he isn’t highly optimistic that local news will survive. 
            
Others believe that local news isn’t dying, but changing. In an interview with WNEM news anchors Meg Mcleod and David Custer, both expressed optimism that local news has a future in our society.
            
“While I don’t think local news will become obsolete, I do believe some mediums for providing local news will,” Mcleod said. “You no longer have to wait for the 6 p.m. news or for the paper to be delivered in order to get the latest headlines. Nowadays, confirmed information can instantly be sent via a push alert or posted on social media by journalists in TV, newspaper or radio.” 
            
Many local news outlets now use multiple media types to continue attracting their audience. In the past, news outlets typically focused on one type of media. Now, outlets like WNEM TV5 not only broadcast daily news coverage on TV but also on itswebsite and social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. As the future looks to be more technology and internet-focused, we can expect to see less physical news and more of an online presence.
            
WNEM works hard to ensure that its content on different platforms tailors to those specific audiences. 
            
“We realize most people always have more than one screen in front of them, whether it’s a TV, cell phone, computer, or tablet,” Custer said. “We make a conscious effort to be aware of the latest apps or social media trends and figure out ways to reach the audience using them. We haven’t always been successful and often realize the person who sits down to watch the news on TV isn’t the same person scrolling through TikTok to get information.”  
            
In their efforts to maintain their audience, WNEM puts importance on the “little stories” of a community.
            
“The little stories have the biggest impact because they mirror all of us,” Custer reported, “When we can relate to an issue or topic it pulls on our inherent sense of community.”
 
Despite these challenges, local news coverage is now more important than ever. In a city known for its well-documented problems, local journalists are essential to illustrating issues and exploring solutions. Without this coverage, residents remain uninformed and uninterested, which kills democracy. My hope is that local news coverage survives in a different form. My question is, how?

Grace Walker is an aspiring journalist from Flint who graduated from Grand Blanc High School. She is currently a freshman at UM-Flint and the last writer for Michigan Times. She plans to transfer to Central Michigan University to pursue a Journalism degree with a minor in Political Science.

Flint Artifacts: Citizens Bank Dime Saver

Maxine Kronick, R.I.P.

Flint legend Maxine Kronick died on January 13 in Flagler Beach, Florida. She was one of the people who made Flint such a fascinating place. She will be missed.

FlaglerLive reports:

Kronick was fierce about acting and actors, fierce about the theater she loved and the children’s theater she founded in Palm Coast, fierce about the arts and artists she championed, fierce about the Israel she loved and where she lived for a few years—as fierce a secularist as she was, and she was that, she was also a proud Jew—and she was fiercely proud of her children and loyal to her friends, and even, at times, to the odd enemy: she debated fiercely, she relished a confrontation, she did not back down, and she liked a forum. 

“As a former resident of Flint, Michigan, an active participant during the civil rights movement and an assistant to the first minority mayor, I am deeply saddened reliving these tragic times,” Kronick wrote in July in one of her innumerable and revealing letters to the editor in the News-Journal over the years, what would prove to be her next-to-last letter. She was decrying assault weapons and the latest mass shootings. And she would make her point quickly, sharply and with her usual wit: “When I lived in Israel a number of years ago, the style of gun used in these shootings was only in the hands of the army. There is no place for these rifles in the hands of everyday citizens. It’s my hope that the NRA will look at its policy on guns and review the horrendous killings we’ve had and re-evaluate its position on assault-style weapons. I don’t care about the caliber of the gun, the make of the gun, the size of it — there needs to be a stop to this. It’s too easy to get one of these weapons.  If you want to hunt, then go to hunting lodges. But stop hunting people on the street.”

Maxine Kronick's obituary, which appeared in The Flint Journal:

She was born and raised in Troy, New York, attended the University of Bridgeport, and lived most of her life in Flint, Michigan, where she developed an acting career. Maxine later was appointed Director of Special Events for the City of Flint, and went on to a career in international events in Israel and Brazil. 

She also produced two documentary films: one focused on the Jewish people remaining in Eastern Europe following the holocaust; and of the 30,000 Jewish lives saved in Shanghai, China. She had spoken in over 80 cities and the documentary "From the Shetl with Love" aired on public television. "Passport to Life, Destination Shanghai" was featured at the West Palm Beach Film Festival. 

Her "3 minutes of fame" was in Michael Moore's first documentary "Roger and Me." 

Upon her return to the States in 1992, she settled in Flagler Beach and created Theateriffic, a professional performing arts company for children. In 2005, Maxine was coordinator of the Daytona Beach Film Festival. "A Grandmother's Wish" by Grandma Max is a children's book written by Maxine, illustrated by young people from the area, and animated by her dear friends Leigh Ann Singleton and David Lawter. She has been a volunteer in the theater department of Buddy Taylor Middle School. 

Maxine leaves a devoted family: Brian and Kathy Kronick, Brittany, Rachel and Jordyn of New Jersey; Scott and Lisa Kronick, Jacquelin and Samuel of Beijing, China; Dana and Michael Buttlar, Eden and Rudy of Laguna Hills, California; and Erin Krugel, Sloane and Orley of Huntington Woods, Michigan.  She was also blessed with many incredible friendships. 

There will be a private funeral and no visitation at her request. Memorial contributions can be made to City Repertory Theater, City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast, Florida 32164; the Simon Wiesenthal Center or any children's charity of your choice . Condolences may be sent to www.craigflaglerpalms.com

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

We are grateful for your intelligence, passion, and dedication to making the United States a better, fairer, and more honorable place for all its citizens.

Listen to the "I have a dream" speech in its entirety here.

William F. Buckley Jr. Comes to Flint by Stephen Rodrick

In honor of William F. Buckley Jr., journalist and Flint Powers graduate Stephen Rodrick looks back at our encounter with the man who, according to The New York Times, "marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse." And endeared himself to many people, including me, who disagreed with his politics.

Take it away, Steve...

In another time, guys hung the heads of dead mammals on their walls. Apparently, they thought this impressed the ladies. But as time passed, proving that you were a hunter lost its aphrodisiac powers with the gatherers. Nowadays, sensitive men have replaced Bambi’s mom with Godard posters, Picasso lithographs, and/or vintage, preferably pre-1979 Debbie Harry shots at CBGB’s.

On my mantel is the key to the City of Flint given to me by William F. Buckley Jr.

This might explain why I am chronically single. It was the spring of 1984, my senior year at Powers Catholic. I had already made a series of fundamental errors: There was the year playing freshman football under the Darwinian Dan Duncan who would have been right at home at Gallipoli. Then there was the time I volunteered to run up to 7-11 and buy Mr. Winchester some smokes only to get my brand new yellow Lands End shirt covered in grass stains and blood after getting picked off like a gimpy antelope by three kids from Flint Northwestern.

Still, my favorite mistake was passing on a chance to see a triple bill of f time for, uh, Spandau Ballet at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. The show was quite entertaining with lots of foppish hair and frilly shirts. I completely disregarded the fact that a middle-aged balding man playing synthesizers provided most of the band’s sound. I forgave a lot because I’d become an Anglophile, which in early 80s Flint made me a jackass.

I blame it on my friends Gordon and Jim. Despite the fact that they both grew up on the not always happy-making streets of Flint, the two of them had developed an obsession with the United Kingdom. Gordie even looked like Sebastian Flyte as played by Anthony Andrews in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. Well, except he wasn’t gay — dude was a playa! — and it’s doubtful Sebastian ever placed his face against a yellow legal pad and said, "Man, look how greasy my face is!" Jim’s take was more rock 'n’ roll, perhaps most tragically summed up by his insistence on wearing a Clash T-shirt from their Cut The Crap tour, which was actually just crap.

Somehow the American version of Anglo mutated into preppiness. We all sort of wished we went to a prep school. They just seemed cooler. I remember Jim and I almost picking up two Carman girls at an Our Lady of Lebanon dance by saying we were lacrosse players from Cranbrook. (This was slightly less entertaining than the OLOL Dance held on the night of the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney fight, where I drank an entire bottle of Mad Dog and then proceeded to tell everyone that I was, in fact, Gerry Cooney. Ah, so many memories.)

No human being better personified the American-as-Englishman than William F. Buckley Jr., Firing Line host, spy novelist, and former New York City mayoral candidate. He spoke in a clipped, hesitating manner accentuated by excellent arching eyebrows. In the spring of 1984, the Flint glitterati laid off some more Buick City workers, pooled the savings, and announced that Buckley was speaking at the Whiting Auditorium and then attending a cocktail party at the University of Michigan-Flint (or maybe it was Mott Community College.)

Luckily, we had a friend named Jon Kells who had a really hot sister, but more importantly in this context, a dad who taught at Michigan-Flint. We scored tickets to the speech and reception, but that wasn’t enough. We gamed the extremely limited flights arriving at Bishop from New York City and cut our afternoon classes to meet Buckley at the airport. Some guys blew off class to get blow jobs or smoke pot, we cut out of Mr. K’s choir torture so we could accost a middle-aged man at the airport.

It seemed right at the time. The best thing was this was celeb-free Flint and three camera crews showed up at the airport! WFB, as his friends called him, made some brief remarks, none of which, I swear, touched on his 1960s support for segregation. After a few minutes, he was rushed away, declining our offer of a ride. We barely touched the hem of his Brook Brothers suit.

I don’t remember much from his Whiting speech. He used a lot of words I never heard of and there were some empty seats; I mean it wasn’t The Nutcracker, what do you expect? The reception was held in some prof’s drafty, vaguely gothic house that probably could be bought for $127,000 back then and could probably be bought for $126,000 now. It was a momentous night for me: my first cocktail party. Now two decades later I know every cocktail party is exactly the same—intolerable made bearable by creeping drunkenness and the idea you’ve been there long enough to split without pissing off the hosts who you probably don’t even like, and hell, the alternative was staying home at watching Homicide: Life On the Street on DVD—but at the time it seemed like something, well, out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Buckley was pounding vodka and grapefruit and had a frozen look on his ruddy face that I now realize was half public persona, half get me the fuck out of here. Waves of assistant professors shook his hand and asked him what he really thought about Gore Vidal, who I didn’t know. Well, I don’t know him now, but I at least know of him.

I don’t know if it was the early spring weather or middle-aged smart folks starved for a little intellectual glitter, but all the grown-ups got stinking drunk, like stinking straight-night at the Copa drunk. After an hour or so, Buckley had enough. His blue eyes began searching for his designated driver. Alas, he found him, but the hapless or happy prof was wasted beyond even the lax Michigan DUI standards of the mid-80s.

He then turned to us, and stage-whispered, "Say, are you boys still good for that ride (pronounced rhiiide)?" We nodded yes. Then Buckley grabbed his Mackintosh and muttered, "Let’s get out of here, then." He said goodbye to no one, which seemed quite British and awesome.

We went out to my car. Buckley blanched for just a moment when he noticed it was a two-tone Chevy Chevette. He piled into the passenger seat and placed his black loafers down on a sea of Taco Bell wrappers and a boom box holding the first Smiths cassette. I lurched the car into drive. Someone asked a complicated question about Reagan and Thatcherism that Buckley answered with a bon mot so heavily accented in alcohol and an American accent not known to common men that I floored the Chevette through a blood red light on Saginaw Street. Buckley didn’t lose his cool, offering just a cautionary stuttering of, "Ah, ah, ah," as he pointed his patrician forefinger toward the next potentially lethal intersection.

It’s a moment I thought of recently after the death of the writer David Halberstam who perished after a Cal Berkeley journalism student ferrying him to an interview with Y.A. Tittle turned left on red with tragic results. Maybe it was luck, maybe it was Buckley’s Yale-educated and old school Catholic God waving off the traffic, but we didn’t get broadsided by a Chevy Blazer.

Buckley was staying at the recently opened and soon to be shuttered Hyatt Regency. As we pulled into the circular drive, I screeched the Chevette to a stop and shut down my V-4. "Now, now, that was an adventure," said Buckley with a smile. I asked him if he could sign something as a memento for me. "I, I think I can do better than that." He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, blue velvety case. His manicured finger popped the case open. Inside was a gold key. The inscription read, “From the Citizens of Flint, Michigan.” Buckley pulled out a fountain pens and signed, "To Stephen, Best Wishes, William F. Buckley." He gathered his trench coat and disappeared into the revolving doors.

Within a few years of the encounter, I stopped buying Buckley’s novels and sailing books and became, quite frankly, ashamed at my earlier conservative leaning, over-compensating with votes for Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. (I still am a bit of an Anglophiliac, I’m listening to "The Kinks Are The Village Preservation Society" as I write this.) For years, the Buckley note remained buried in a drawer, a reminder of a not so happy time in my life. I took it out a few years ago, and thought about it in a different way: here was a famous man who, when confronted with three slightly insane teenage fans with varying hygiene and acne issues, treated us with grace. I work as a journalist in New York now and sometimes cover politics. I thought I might run into Buckley at some similarly lame cocktail party. It never happened. Perhaps it was just as well. Not even Evelyn Waugh could write a better second act.

What we talk about when we talk about San Francisco

For a hint of what conversations are like in San Francisco these days — amidst the housing crisis, homelessness problem, and gentrification wars — I present a recent verbatim email exchange among four longtime residents. Names have been changed to Oscar, Felix, Murray, and Roy. 

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:11 AM Oscar wrote:
My position on housing in SF as fantastically articulated by Sonja Trauss, a "deeply eccentric city-government nerd" and housing activist in SF. Interestingly, I read about her in The Stranger, a Seattle paper. It may have something to do with the fact that here in SF, at least in the Mission, pictures of her with dollar signs for eyes have been taped to telephone polls. Here's her evil plot:

"We need more housing units, and the market-rate units we build now will become tomorrow’s middle-income apartments. Her theory is based on her experience working for a neighborhood advisory committee in a rapidly gentrifying part of Philadelphia right before the mid-2000s housing bubble burst. “When the market crashed,” Trauss told me, “all those projects we had approved went on sale for a third of the price they would have, while all the projects we gummed up were never built. We lost the opportunity to create more units.”

Lest you think she is in the pocket of the developers, like a lot of Missionites apparently do, she is also a member of an organization that is trying to sue Bay Area suburbs for their restrictive building policies, i.e. they're trying to force suburbs to build more housing, too.

I like her position because it's considers the long view. We don't want to be the people in the 60's and 70's who fought BART expansion because it seemed like too much change. And it would have definitely changed neighborhoods then, maybe even for the worse (16th and 18^th BART weren't nice 'hoods for a long time) but obviously we could really use those proposed BART stops now, 40 years later.

It's the same with housing. Market rate stuff today might become middle class housing later, but you have to build it while there's demand or it might not ever get done. Look how hard it is to find developers now to build affordable housing; wouldn't it be great if 40 years ago more stuff had been built? We will likely be thinking the same thing 40 years from now.

And if you don't build market rate stuff now, it puts enormous pressure on the existing housing stock. There have been 5 homes that have sold on my block in the past year, 4 of which were 2 million dollars, and 1 of which was 1 million that's going to be flipped for at least twice that. These were middle class and lower class homes just 10-20 years ago. There is no way I could afford my neighborhood now, and I bought just 5 years ago. Only rich people can move in now.

So when I hear "oh great, a new building is going up for rich people," it seems to me that rich people are moving here whether we build stuff or not, so do you want them buying up all the existing houses/condos in formerly poor and middle class neighborhoods, putting enormous pressure on landlords to sell, or do you want them in new buildings? Because they're coming here either way. It doesn't mean we have to do it carte blanche, we can still have robust planning and zoning and affordable housing requirements for new apartment buildings. But we have to build.

Sorry for the longness. I think I really need a job.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:53 AM Felix wrote:

Yes, we need rigorous zoning so that we build in order to satisfy demand while not destroying the character of the city. Of course it's going to change, but we need to guide that change in order to maintain the things we cherish in the city and the things that people move here for. 

But we also need to find a way to build affordable housing. Market rate housing just doesn't work in places like San Francisco that are geographically limited. It's simply impossible and keeps getting demonstrated in any other development area where geography is a key factor like Manhattan, London, or Hong Kong. 

And that leads to the larger issues here. The entire Bay Area needs to develop together which requires more pockets of urban density, a very robust transit system area wide, and a more united local government because the administration of growth has been lacking. I'll leave the larger area governance question for later but here in San Francisco we have a local government that struggles to play an effective role in all of these questions. Part of that is simple leadership in that Ed Lee clearly is not the person to lead a discussion nor find the programs nor hire the people to make the changes. Part is structural in that the city has to live within a legislative structure erected over 150 years. Part is due the depressingly normal state of political anomie by our citizens.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 11:21 AM Oscar wrote:

But what if we can't figure out a way to build affordable housing? Because my guess is we won't (we never have). What if we don't get a dynamic leader to help the entire Bay Area develop in concert? Don't hold your breath (since I've been here we've had Brown, Newsom, and Lee). The argument seems to be if we can't build perfectly, we shouldn't build at all. And that leaves us in our current situation, with way more demand than supply, and the things we cherish get changed anyway because the rich keep moving here. It's the classic situation of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

I'm curious about your contention that market rate housing just doesn't work in SF. What proof is there of that? There is evidence that rents started really going up in 50's, which is when a most of SF land was built on. Since then, there just hasn't been an ability to easily build out, we can just build up. And most of SF has been against building up since then, and continues to be. I'm not sure you can say that something doesn't work if it hasn't really been tried.

And as for keeping the character of SF intact, that doesn't seem possible. I've been here since '97 and it's now a totally different city, and in '97 it was a totally different city than it was in '77. I'm not even sure what SF's character is right now, or if anybody comes here because of it. I think people come here because of the economy, and they want to live in SF because it's a fun city with a lot of bars and restaurants. No one's coming here because it's a cool art scene, or because it's so bohemian. That era is long gone, probably before any of us even moved here.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 2:06 PM Murray wrote:

Frighteningly, I'm not sure we are not all right at the same time. Which seems like a bad sign.

Some timely reading from my favorite mayoral candidate:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/portland-fears-following-san-franciscos-footsteps/

A favorite quote from one of my favorite union leaders:

"Change is inevitable; progress is not."

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 3:50 PM Felix wrote:

Nah, I want to avoid the perfect/good dichotomy. If we do nothing we get what we have now, rampant traffic and development that doesn't fit together. It'll hit a wall soon, there will be another election battle over growth, but good policy probably won't win out. 

The thing is that we know how to build affordable housing but it takes lots of planning, lots of collaboration with developers, and more of a region wide solution. We're doing it all over SOMA, in the Castro, Bay View, and in Oakland. Most notably we are not doing it in Marin, and the vast majority of the peninsula where there is tons of land. And we're not developing the transportation network that we need to get people from affordable areas on the periphery of Alameda to the jobs everywhere else. One of the big problems here is that we haven't been doing it for decades so there's pent up demand. 

Everything I've read about development policy in NY says that the city explicitly embraced market rate housing growth as the solution to cost from the 90's through the Bloomberg administration. They built hundreds of thousands of units and the cost of housing only increased while affordable housing decreased. I remember reading that Bloomberg's own housing czar admitted that market rate housing solutions didn't work but can't dig up that piece. I've read the same for cities with constrained space, high foreign capital flows, which are also perceived as very desirable. Here's one piece that is a summation of Bloomberg's housing policies but keep in mind that he was just continuing the Giuliani administration's policies so that's 20 years of aggressive development that continues to this day. 

http://www.wnyc.org/story/304422-new-york-remade-city-more-desirable-ever-also-too-expensive-many/

Sure, the city has changed dramatically since I moved here and I don't know if I can define the character of it either but you sound like the worst crotchety old man by saying it's not cool any more. It's definitely a different sort of cool, there is all sorts of crazy innovative stuff happening here that may not be traditional art but it's pretty amazing. I'll skip technology altogether. Look at the culinary world alone where SF is in the white hot center of the coffee/brewing/chocolate/sustainable food/and many other movements. The high culture scene is insane with the new SFMOMA being just the latest addition. Sports culture is everywhere from our professional teams to all the amateur soccer action, climbing gyms, the surfing at Ocean Beach, bicyclists, you name it. Take two small examples of literary culture, LitQuake and 826 as examples of that scene. And that's just what I know about. God knows what the literal kids are doing today. 

But back to solutions. Everyone agrees that we need housing, and that we need affordable housing so let's figure out how to build it so that everyone wins. The same goes for business regulations, transportation, schools, homelessness, and the other big issues facing the city and region. We need to carve a way out of this stasis because that's where we've been for far too long. Everyone is frustrated to point of giving up which is incredibly dangerous. I see that frequently in my own little corner of volunteer activism at Mila's school. It's really easy to burn out and give up because the process it so difficult to deal with. But everything is going to keep turning so if you can stay engaged then your voice is going to be heard more than anyone else's. With that somewhat minor observation I have to stop because I actually have work to do today, or perhaps I should start viewing this as my true work.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 4:32 PM Oscar wrote:

I think we just like different things. Most of the cool stuff you mention about SF is due to it being a city full of well-off and rich people (the rest is due to it being in a naturally beautiful region). All that coffee/food/sustainability stuff really took off in the 90's and 00's after the tech booms, though I grant you that the seeds of some of it was already here. But it takes money to support $4 cups of coffee, $8 beer pints, and $25/pound sustainably caught salmon at Avedanos. So it seems like if the city becomes even wealthier, you'll just get more of what you like. It's not like New York or London lack that stuff, even if they're not on the forefront of it, they're adopting it. It seems to me the culture you want to keep is just upper-middle class culture. Which is nice, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't describe it as especially cool, to my taste anyway. And I certainly don't see it going away, it just seems to get stronger. And it's funny speculating what the kids are doing here, because there are fewer literal kids in SF than any comparable city in the US.

But my point was really that people aren't moving here for the culture. They're moving here to get jobs, because this is where a huge new economy is growing. That's going to make it more expensive, no matter how many places we build. But if we don't build anything, then it's going to be more expensive than if we build nothing. And we have to give people who move here for jobs someplace to live. Nowhere in the article on NYC did it say how many units Bloomberg built, and it doesn't give any info on how expensive it might be if they hadn't been built, nor does it talk about how many people would be living outside NYC and commuting there. I'm sure there are some economists who have an opinion on all that. Building housing might not make things cheaper immediately, but it sure doesn't make things more expensive.

But I do agree that we need better planning and zoning of all sorts. We just can't, for instance, not build anything in the Mission for 2 years while we get things just right, because if our history with BART or MUNI is any indication, we'll never get it exactly right. And we need to get more housing in the Peninsula, but again, we can't say we won't build stuff here until that happens. All the stuff you want is great but should have been done decades ago, and now we don't have the luxury of waiting for it.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 4:45 PM Felix wrote:

Sorry, I'll respond to everything else later but the figures I've seen for the Bloomberg administration alone are 160,000 units to house more than 300,000 people. There's lots written about it, take a look. 

And it's not like we're not building here. We've been building at a torrid pace of at least 3,500 units/year going back at least a few years and permits for building are almost quadruple that last year. 

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 4:50 PM Oscar wrote:

We might be building at a torrid pace for SF, but we could build a lot more than 3,500 a year if we wanted. And I'm talking about density, tall shit, in neighborhoods with existing transit.

Anyway, we should clearly talk about this more offline but I'm just curious--are you saying that NYC shouldn't have built those 160,000 housing units because they caused housing in NYC to become more expensive?

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 5:02 PM Roy wrote:

I haven't had time to ready your back and forth, but I hope you all read this: 

https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html?m=1

This is all new. I'd be curious to see this done with data from other cities to see if it holds. If so, there appear to be implications for understanding what impacts housing affordability and, more specifically, how you can forecast and plan to address it.

https://twitter.com/andersem/status/732151176683130881

And here's a follow-up that says SF is screwed but other cities have a chance not to be screwed. 

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 8:56 AM Felix wrote:
In the urban future all cities are going to face this challenge so maintaining a unique sense of place, diversity, and affordability are all the major concerns for urbanists these days. 

WRT NY's development, I'm just saying that they built aggressively and housing only got more expensive so simply building doesn't do anything for affordability, it just creates more housing for the affluent, lots of it as parking lots for international cash. You really have to manage it otherwise you run into the same problem. All things considered SF may not be doing that badly simply because it has so many requirement for affordable housing but there is a lot of room for improvement. 

As for what we're doing, yes, density is great. We're doing tons of that. Look at Rincon where massive condo developments have been built for the past ten years. There's plenty more to come because that's the long term plan for the city, ie develop density along transport corridors. There are even bright spots elsewhere, there's this huge project to build densely all along El Camino Real which is a real change. 

Flint Artifacts: Citizens Bank Car Financing

Dispatches from the Rust Belt: The Best of Belt Year One

I'm clearly the target audience for Belt Magazine, the online ode to all things Rust Belt run out of Cleveland. It's only been around one year, but it has managed to corner the market on intensely reported, heartfelt, and sometimes funny coverage of post-industrial America. It's personal and raises larger issues about the forces shaping the entire country, not just the Midwest. And I'd say that even if I didn't write for it.Here's how founder and Editor Anne Trubek describes it:

When Belt Magazine launched one year ago, we did so for one basic reason: We felt that Cleveland and other cities in the Rust Belt were being defined by outside media that didn’t know us. We wanted to tell our own story ourselves. 

So we assembled writers, engaged citizens, academic experts, history buffs, and all sorts of people who live and work here to write about who we are. Some of our stories are long-form investigative journalism, some are essays about the arts and historic preservation, and many are thoughtful commentaries about economic issues. Quite frankly, we are proud of how we have progressed in the past year, engaging people who are interested in issues that matter. Visitors to our site continue to increase, and the number of people who support us by becoming members keeps growing. People join Belt to be part of a community and to acknowledge our commitment to pay writers, to edit carefully, and to have an independent voice.

Dispatches from the Rust Belt: The Best of Belt Year One is an anthology of Belt's first year. It features the work of Jacqueline Marino, Laura Putre, Jake Austen, Edward McClelland and many more writers. Including me. (Okay, that was awkward.)

Pre-order Dispatches from the Rust Belt here.

Making Ground-Level Retail Work for Cities

Over the past few years, ground floor retail businesses have slowly returned to downtown Flint. It may not be the bustling shopping district of the fifties, but it's a vast improvement over the ghostly Saginaw Street of the nineties.

Writing in the June issue of The Urbanist, Benjamin Grant tackles the nuances, history, and challenges of street-level retail.

Ground floor retail has its origins in the homes of urban artisans in medieval and Roman cities. Where fortifications put space at a premium, the family home was often above the family workshop, and business was conducted through an opening onto the street. 

By the late 18th century, workshops were giving way to factories, and, in Paris and London, plate glass and gaslight helped create the urban storefront as we know it — a space for shopping, not making. In the 19th century, the era of the flaneur, the street itself was reinvented as a genteel public space, and grand treelined boulevards played host to a fashionable parade of shopping, self-presentation and spectacle. 

Modernist architects like Le Corbusier were suspicious of commerce, and found the tight, clamorous spaces of the 19th-century city oppressively filthy and congested. They sought to “free the ground plane” by raising their towers on stilt-like pilotis, so that citizens might wander through a new species of park-like city at their ease, never channeled into something as vulgar as a street. These architects peeled apart the city’s mixture, and in doing so they created separate sectors for offices, factories and homes, and built pedestrian sky bridges over sweeping expressways. The intended spaces of discovery became spaces of desolation. 

In the mid-to-late 20th century, the car was king. In subdivisions, shopping malls, housing projects and office complexes, inward looking, single-use environments were the norm. For nearly half a century, urban development in the U.S. got an almost total pass from pedestrian considerations. leaving a legacy of blank walls, narrow or non-existent sidewalks and dead spaces. 

In the 1960s, critics like Jane Jacobs and architects like Oscar Newman and Jan Gehl began investigating exactly what it was that made traditional urbanism (then under attack) work so well. They zeroed in on the interaction of building edges, public streets, and social interaction, creating some of the classic analyses in urban design. Their efforts revolutionized urban design, and their emphasis on the human scale — once dismissed as quaint and unscientific — has become planning orthodoxy. 

Today, walkable streets enlivened by active uses are a widely shared priority, critical to supporting transit, reducing carbon emissions and tackling chronic diseases. But bringing streets to life – especially outside city centers – can be quite a challenge.

Flint's economic situation poses daunting obstacles to retail development, but the city is not alone in facing numerous struggles to help street-level stores, restaurants, and other businesses gain a foothold. Grant presents a good overview of the challenges and successes of street-level retail in the San Francisco Bay Area. Obviously, a very different scenario than Flint, but there are many similarities. Ground-level retail isn't the easiest enterprise to pull off, even in a booming economy:

Just because planners allow, or even require, ground floor retail spaces, does not mean there will be ground-floor retail. Retailers, who live and die according to foot traffic, visibility and neighboring stores, are very sensitive to both location and quality of their spaces and they are well aware that if you build it, customers won’t automatically come.
Planners don’t create cafes (or restaurants or grocery stores) and for the most part, neither do developers. Entrepreneurs do. It is true that a building without a storefront will never contain a store. On the other hand, the world is full of empty storefronts. The weakness of ground-floor retail in mixed-use construction is so notorious that developers routinely write it off, assuming no revenue at all.

But it's clear that making downtown Flint a welcoming gathering place is a key part of improving the city, along with helping the city's neighborhoods rebound from abandonment and decay.

Public life is the essence of urbanism. The city’s ability to facilitate movement, commerce, democracy, innovation and creativity resides in the currents and eddies of human beings at the boundary of public and private space, where homes, jobs, shops and civic buildings touch streets, parks and plazas. 

In a good urban neighborhood, the ground floors of the buildings work symbiotically with the surrounding sidewalks and public spaces. Together they provide a continuous network of pathways and experiences that are active, safe, comfortable and engaging. The ground-floor café (and retail more generally) is but one of many good ways for buildings to meet the street. After all, even a coffee-crazed town like San Francisco can’t have a café — or even retail — in every building. A good city requires solutions as varied as its fabric and its people and must constantly invent new ones.